Military Masks Could 'Give Injured Soldiers Their Faces Back'

Share

Military Masks Could 'Give Injured Soldiers Their Faces Back'

This is how the military might treat burned faces in 2017: A mask, worn for several months, that's layered with sensors, actuators and a regenerative elixir – including stem cells – to regrow missing facial tissue.

An estimated 85 percent of recent wartime injuries caused damage to the extremities or face. Already, the Pentagon's made swift progress in using regenerative medicine to more effectively heal those wounds. They're building fresh muscle tissue out of pig cells, repairing damaged flesh with spray-on skin and even fusing broken bones with an injectable compound.

Biomask could be the next of those breakthroughs, if it pans out. It's the result of a collaboration between engineers at UT Arlington, regenerative medicine specialists at Northwestern University, and experts from the Brooke Army Medical Center and the Army Institute of Surgical Research.

Right now, the mask is in early stages of development. But Eileen Moss, a research scientist at UT Arlington and the project's leader, tells Danger Room that the team's already got a good sense of how it'll look and work. Most importantly, she says, the mask would "give soldiers back the face they had before the injury."

The mask will be comprised of two major layers. The top, a hard shell, will protect a patient's face and also store electrical components. Underneath, a flexible polymer mask will fit around the contours of a patient's face. It'll be embedded with three more layers: An array of sensors to track the rate of healing, actuators to push up against the wound and hold the mask in place, and a network of micro-tubing and valves to pump therapeutics – whether antibiotics and pain killers or stem cells and growth factor – onto specific regions of the wound.

"Sensors would monitor the wound, and treatment inside the mask would be based on that data," Moss says. "If healing is accelerated in one area of the burn, then the mask would know to supply different therapeutics to that region."

All that, and the embedded sensors would transmit data to doctors in real time, offering them constant insight into how a patient's wound was progressing underneath the Biomask.

If researchers pull it off, Biomask would be light-years ahead of the current standard of care for treating facial burns. Right now, wounded soldiers undergo dozens of surgeries to repair damage. Skin grafts often don't take, and need to be removed. Even if the grafting works, it's routinely accompanied by deformities, scarring, speech impediments and a loss of facial function.

"Surgeons do a great job," Moss says. "But the face that soldiers end up with has a lot of problems. There might be disfigurement or scars. They might be missing an ear or maybe they can't blink. That face just can't be fully used anymore."

By offering customized 24/7 healing, along with fresh tissue instead of grafts, Biomask could very well change all of that. And like much of the Pentagon's wild medical research, this one's moving at breakneck speed: The team expects a device that's ready for military hospitals within five years.